It is truth, in the old saying, that is ‘the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Winston Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; I believe this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that ‘history' had so far denied him — the winning of a democratic election.